Rich Internet Applications

Silverlight, Flex, and JavaFx are all trying to capture a new market of rich Internet applications that promise to be the best of both desktop applications and web applications. However, none of them are accessible to agents. Like desktop applications, they can only be used for the purpose they were designed for and cannot be used for indexing, harvesting, or used in mashups. This is not surprising as none of their businesses depend on open interoperability. The only big web players that depend on open interoperability are Google and Yahoo!, which is why Google funds the Mozilla and Chrome browser projects.

The web's biggest success is the inter-connectivity and vast amount of information available in the same format (HTML). It will be interesting to see if these new RIA platforms will have any effect on the trend of moving applications to the web.